The Madwoman Upstairs (43 page)

I breathed out once, sharp. “Forgive me, sir, but
don’t you care
?”

When he looked back at me, there was a serene smile on his face. He said, “No. I appreciate that there is a physical book in your hands, and that perhaps it once belonged to someone famous. But this makes no difference to me. I will continue to honor Anne Brontë’s novels as they are, not as she might have intended them to be. Tampering with a finished novel now will only lead to the inevitable destruction of what you seek to protect.”

“Are you telling me that you are not even slightly curious?” I asked, waving the book at him like I might a long salami sandwich.

“A diary is worthless on its own,” he said. “It’s like that painting of yours. It is meaningless, is it not, without the story behind it?
Jane Eyre
can survive without the painting in your room, and yet the painting is nothing without
Jane Eyre
. You know which one I would prefer.”

He must have sensed the epic frown growing on my face, because he added: “I am impressed—truly—that you found this. But people write diaries and unpublished novels all the time. I myself have written a few.”

“But this is a
historical artifact
.”

He gave a sad smile. “No, this is a family heirloom. Think of how many fathers and grandfathers that book went through to get into your hands. This is—shall we say—a personal matter? If your father thought Anne Brontë wanted her confessions released to the world, I doubt he would have kept this to himself.”

At that, I leaned back in my seat, deflated. It was not the response I’d been expecting, nor was it the answer I wanted to hear. I was hoping he might kindly explain the diary’s significance to me, in clear and irrefutable terms. I put the book back on the table. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to read it, either. Several nights ago, I’d read a few passages, but quickly grew so upset that I had to put the whole thing down. The diary wasn’t exactly dull, but it also wasn’t what I’d call exciting. It wasn’t really anything at all. The author was not an Anne Brontë I recognized; she was just another person who decided to chronicle all the things she had done during the day. It was difficult to decide whether she was happy, or bored, or livid. The answer would have been obvious, I’m sure, to someone who knew her well. What I
did
discover was that a large number of pages had been entirely ripped out. By whom, I suppose I would never know. What I had in my possession was the skeleton of something that may have once been great.

I hadn’t opened the book since, and my vexation had only worsened.
The Warnings of Experience,
I realized, had the power to disrupt all the careful, meticulous little worlds I had built for myself, and for the Brontës. Here, in my hands, could be the spoiler for every story I had ever invented; it was the movie that made you forever un-see the book. If I read Anne Brontë’s diary, then I ran the risk losing an old friend who I was only just beginning to regain. The Brontë sisters
I
knew would disappear in a poof, and then where would I be?

I let out a huff of air. “I didn’t read it.”

“I figured that might be the case.”

“Oh?”

“Your father’s purpose may not have been to leave you an outrageous diary, but to show you that an outrageous diary could exist—and out of fiction,” he said. “What did you call it before? Literal truth.”

I shook my head. “No. No. That’s what I thought earlier too. But then I realized that Dad must have had this diary his entire life. And what did he do with it? He just sat in his study, reading and rereading the novels. If he were concerned with discovering ‘literal’ truth, shouldn’t the novels be useless once he had the diary? The diary is like reading a map with no legend.”

“Yes? What are you saying?” Orville asked.

I slunk into my seat. “I think I’ve been focused on the wrong thing this entire time. This diary is not terribly valuable unless we understand Helen Graham, and the reason she wrote the diary in the first place. Nor is the diary terribly interesting unless we understand Bertha Mason, and all the potential inside a repressed female brain. Anne Brontë’s life doesn’t give meaning to this diary; the Brontë novels give meaning to this diary. The fiction is more real than the reality.”

For the first time since I knew him, Orville beamed. He positively beamed. He put down his books and stood up straight.

“Very good, Samantha,” he said. “That was very good.”

I looked up. “You’re not going to argue with me?”

“No. I quite like that theory.”

I blinked. “So this is V-E day?”

“Pardon?”

“Victory in Europe.”

“I’m aware of the term.”

“That’s what my dad called it whenever he won arguments overseas.”

“Ah,” said Orville, with a nod and the ghost of a smile. He added, “Ergo.”

And with that, he turned his back toward me and returned to his shelves. I saw a fresh copy of
Pamela
drop into the box beneath him. He turned and began to unload the next shelf. Was that it? A fresh wave of sadness hit me. We would be departing soon—I to my tower, Orville to the leprechauns. I had never had to say goodbye forever to someone who was not dead.

“Tell me,” he said over his shoulder, “do you know who your new tutor will be?” If I was not mistaken, a note of protectiveness had crept into his voice.

I said, “Not you.”

“I am aware of that.”

“I suppose I will now have to become an uneducated heathen.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“My life is over.”

I didn’t mean to sound as apocalyptic as I did, but there it was. He was leaving the country—was I supposed to be happy? I had injected more of myself than I had ever intended into our nonexistent relationship. Now I would have to relocate the bits and pieces of myself that I had lost, and put myself back together, like a waterlogged puzzle whose pieces didn’t quite fit anymore.

I kept my eyes down. “Ireland is a long way away, sir.”

“Not really.”

“It is a long way away from
you.
”

“Pardon?”

I rested
The Warnings of Experience
on the table and stood up. I took a few steps toward him. When he sensed me coming, Orville put down his books. I looked him straight in the eye. The devastation on my face was entirely out of my control.

I said, “What would you like to do about us, sir?”

He said, “Us?”

“Brother Heathcliff and Sister Cathy.”

There—right there. The Subtext collapsed like the backdrop of a busy theater, exposing all the intricate workings behind the set. Orville frowned. At last, he knew. He knew that I loved him. Perhaps he had always known, and the game that I’d thought I was playing so subtly was in fact anything but. He was looking me straight in the eye. He knew.

He didn’t respond right away. It was a fragile moment. We seemed to be in Act V of a Shakespearean play that could end either in marriage or in premature death. I was breathing heavily.

“We’ve been good friends, have we not?” he said.

I felt robbed. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

“You must understand that anything between us is impossible.”

“Does that mean you at least acknowledge that there is something between us?”

He paused. “I forget how young you are sometimes.”

“That seems somewhat irrelevant.”

“When you are older, you will realize that the things you feel to be true don’t require verbal confirmation.”

I let out a breath. “Fine. I’m still young. Give me verbal confirmation, please.”

Orville looked toward the windows and began scratching the back of his neck. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again.

“I care for you a great deal,” he said.

“Fantastic,” I said. “What happens now?”

“We say goodbye.”

“You are rejecting me?”

“It is not rejection when nothing has been offered.”

“I offer you my heart, my hand, and everything I have.”

He looked back at me. “Then yes, I reject you. Please don’t take it the wrong way.”

I swallowed. Somewhere inside, I began screaming, quietly at first, and then louder and louder, like a kettle reaching the height of its temper. I tried to read Orville’s impassive face, but he looked like a mannequin.

“I don’t understand why this is a problem,” I said.

“I have an uncomplicated loyalty to duty.”

“But you’re no longer my professor.”

“What difference does that make?”

“You have no more duties anymore. You can go back to being a libertine.”

He sounded strained, like he was giving birth. “I will be someone
else’s
tutor, and someone else’s tutor after that. Do you not see the problem? I am an
educator
. Propriety mandates that you and I will stay friends, Miss Whipple—if that.”

“ ‘Miss Whipple’? Let’s not get carried away.”

“I cannot continue this conversation.”

“You’re just afraid.”

I was speaking with more confidence than I felt, only because inside, I was dying, and very slowly. I could feel emptiness widening like a balloon inside my torso, replacing what had once been Orville with more and more empty space. Years from now, maybe the balloon would shrink, but it would never disappear. It would just become a small satellite, orbiting my heart.

Orville took a step closer and we stood face-to-face.

“Think of it,” he said slowly, in a way that suggested he had already thought about it several times. “Think of what you are asking me to do. Teaching, academia—it is my life. It is not a hobby, nor is it a game. I
cannot
be with you, Samantha. You believe that our stations have changed. They have not changed. As long as you are a student, we will never be equals. I am in a position of authority. I will always be right, and you will always be less right. Is that what you want out of a relationship?”

“What I hear you saying is that you want to wait to be together until I am independently intelligent,” I said. “But don’t you think there’s more to a relationship than just intellect? Aren’t you being a little superficial?”

He looked irritated. “Do you think this is easy for me?” he said. “I am leaving for Ireland so I can
escape
you. Don’t look at me like that—I’m sure you know it’s true. I refuse to be tempted against my better judgment, and it is not right for you to believe that as a student you are a source of temptation. You are an exceptionally bright and rare creature and you deserve an education. This is my final word. You can argue, but I am too fond of you to have it any other way. Understood?”

I didn’t say anything. Orville must have spent himself on his verdict because he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and turned back to his packing. I stood silently as he presented me with the unyielding line of his back. We didn’t say anything for several minutes. I had nothing to do but glance down at the great authors at my feet. Try as I might, I found that I could no longer hate them. I felt at home, suddenly, standing among the Hemingways and the Nabokovs and the Tolstoys and the Porters. Here was a cushion of the world’s most famous broken hearts, alcoholics, and lunatics. They were here, in this room, right now—I could almost feel them breathing on me, offering their support. Austen, Fitzgerald, Burney, Dostoyevsky. Out of all their collective misery came a tapestry of hope, one so real that it seemed almost fictional in its convenience.

I turned back to the sofa and reached for my coat, which I had left slung over the armrest. I picked up
The Warnings of Experience.
What a cruel, cruel trick that the book should exist, when the only fiction I had ever wanted to become real was James Orville III.

And yet . . . ? I turned around, heart slamming into my chest.

“I hope you know that you’ve left me no other choice but to become a writer,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Me. Writer. I will have to invent an alternate ending to this. I see no other solution.”

“Are you leaving already?”

“I’m leaving.”

“You’re crying.”

“Am I?”

A strange thing happened just then. Orville looked at me with a pain so deep that for a moment, I wondered if I had conjured it on his face out of sheer will. He seemed different somehow, like a portrait I had painted that was now stepping out of the canvas to show me my work. I’d thought our conversation was over, but in the span of a few seconds, he had closed the distance between us and was kissing me—so forcefully, and with so much confused passion, that I don’t remember much else, which meant that it was either a very good kiss or a very poor one. I assumed it must be the former, because I forgot myself entirely, lost in something more powerful than I had anticipated. As he tightened his arms around me, I felt bound to him by a strange, externally mandated and crushing inevitability. He broke away only to whisper something so soft and sweet that I thought perhaps I was narrating the scene myself.

Suddenly, it didn’t seem as if we were leaving each other at all—no, quite the opposite. I recall a sense of belonging unlike anything I had ever experienced, and a feeling of freedom in which anything seemed possible. When we emerged on the other side of the room, his arms were wound so tightly around me that his hands were my hands, his chest was my chest. Then and only then did the two of us say goodbye. I walked past him and to the door.

When I turned around one last time, I saw that all the Wordsworth books behind us had spilled over the floor like confetti.

EPILOGUE

R
eader, I married him.

Not that day, and not that year, and not even in five years. But we did marry and it was a beautiful, small wedding in the north of England. James Timothy Orville III proposed at Oscar Wilde’s tomb, as he ought to have done. There were birds and dresses. I ended up writing two long-form memoirs, which Orville complained lacked style and artistry and any semblance of a realistic ending but whose numerous drafts he kept on his nightstand in small stacks and which he loyally read over and over, until they were eventually published. It was a life I could have created almost entirely out of thin air.